Inhofe: Obama is Destroying American Institutions

Just about everything wrong in America today is President Barack Obama’s fault, according to Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe.

Obama has disarmed the country, is solely responsible for the federal budget deficit and must bear most of the blame for the dependence on overseas oil and for “suffocating” business with regulations,” said the state’s senior senator in a speech reported by the Tulsa World.

“We now have a president, and I don’t mean this disrespectfully, who is destroying these very institutions that made America great,” Inhofe told the Chamber of Commerce in Broken Arrow, Okla.

The president’s healthcare proposals amount to “social engineering,” extended unemployment benefits aren’t needed and Inhofe said Obama had “invented” the idea that suspected terrorists have been tortured at Guantanamo Bay “to make you think something bad is happening in America — the same thing he does and others do when they go around talking about how bad America is.

“You know the biggest problem for prisoners when they get to Gitmo?” Inhofe asked. “Obesity!”

He even blamed Obama for the tea party-inspired ban on earmarks that the GOP has adopted. “When they came along with this moratorium, you have to let the president run everything,” he said. “They conceded that authority to the president of the United States, so that’s why the president was behind the whole earmark thing."

He attacked that ban as, he said, it has prevented a new $10 million control tower at Tinker Air Force Base near Oklahoma City.

On the deficit, Inhofe, who has served in the Senate since 1994, said, “It’s the president’s budget. Period. That’s the end of it." The debt limit agreement, he described as “a sham that does little or nothing to reduce overall spending.”

Inhofe said regulations that he laid out in detail would cost billions of dollars in added taxes and lost productivity. He said the country could be totally independent from dependency on Middle East oil “in a matter of weeks, not years,” if the president allowed fossil fuel exploration on public lands.

When it came to unemployment benefits, he said they are not needed in his home state as Oklahoma – where the unemployment rate stands at 5.5 percent, the fifth lowest in the country – has “virtually full employment.”
Inhofe, who earlier this year criticized House majority leader Eric Cantor for suggesting that Republicans had to share some of the blame for the state of the economy, said Obama had allowed military spending to fall as a percentage of gross domestic product.